In some shoe cover dispensers, shoe covers are stacked inside of dispensers with clips at each of the four corners of every shoe cover and with the clips connected by an elastic band. FIGS. 1 and 1A show exemplary shoe covers 2 having clips 4 connected by elastic bands 6. The clips 4 work in conjunction with a dispensing mechanism to hold a flexible cloth, fabric or paper shoe covering portion 10 of the shoe covers in an expanded, non-deployed position. A foot may then be placed within the boundary of the cover and the dispenser can release the shoe cover from the four corner clips. The elastic band 6 is released from within the clips, thereby causing the shoe covering portion 10 to collapse and be secured around the shoe.
Shoe cover dispensers utilize various clip designs. Exemplary clips are shown in FIG. 2. On each dispenser, the particular clip design of choice is secured at all four corners of each shoe cover in the stack. Thus, an elastic band held within a given clip lies directly atop a corresponding elastic band from the clip below. As shown in FIGS. 3A and 3B, this tends to create tall, inefficient stacks due to the thickness of the elastic bands, leaving large spaces in between the shoe covers unused. Furthermore, the thick elastic bands prevent the clips from sitting directly on top of each other in a parallel position, and instead cause the top and bottom clips to be angled with respect to each other. This condition can cause jamming and interference with dispenser function. Simply compressing the shoe covers together only exaggerates this condition by further reducing the height of the stack at the outer edge (at the clips) relative to where the clip attaches to the elastic bands.
It would be advantageous to be able to consistently include more shoe covers within a given stack, while improving dispenser function. Increasing the number of shoe covers within each stack, without changing the height of the stack, can allow a single dispenser of modest size to provide a large number of shoe covers, such as for large events, while reducing the need to frequently replenish the dispenser with covers.
It would also be advantageous to not have to manually load each shoe cover one at a time into a dispenser.